Learn Silicon Valley Way of Scaling in Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman
Reid Hoffman doesn’t need an intro in the tech world, but for non-tech people, he is the founder of LinkedIn and an early executive at PayPal.
I started following Reid recently because of his latest podcast series, Master of Scale, where he talks to entrepreneurs who have scaled their businesses to dominate the world, such as Facebook, Airbnb, Slack, and more.
I came to know about this book through Reid’s social media post and immediately asked my assistant to order it for me especially because it talks about scaling and LoginRadius is in scaling mode.
About the book
Reid authored Blitzscaling along with Chris Yeh, who also co-authored The Alliance with Reid. The book was released in October 2018 and has 302 pages, so it does require a little time commitment. You can find it on Amazon and it costs US$28.
The book is very well structured in the following six parts:
Part I: What is Blitzscaling?
Part II: Business Model Innovation
Part III: Strategy Innovation
Part IV: Management Innovation
Part V: The Broader Landscape of Blitzscaling
Part VI: Responsible Blitzscaling
My thoughts on Blitzscaling
Blitzscaling is a step before of unicorn — a startup with a valuation of over one billion dollars. It is about scaling a consumer internet company at lightning speed to a massive size, blowing the competition out of the water. The author talks about internet consumer companies that have achieved massive scale and how they did it; then he suggests a framework on how one can blitzscale a company.
I really liked the book and believe the authored recorded the scaling methodology of massively successful internet consumer companies. However, LoginRadius being a B2B company, there were a lot of things to learn for me.
Who is Blitzscaling for?
I highly recommend this book to entrepreneurs, investors, and advisors who are in the consumer internet space. It will give an idea if your business could possibly blitzscale or not. If yes, then you’ll know the methodology for how to do that.
The author talks about blitzscaling in non-internet business scenarios but I am not fully sold on that. Yes, you can apply some of these methodologies, but the framework is not going to be that effective for a non-internet business.
